Entrance Examination

Please join us for our upcoming Entrance Examination:

December 9, 2017 at 9 AM

The examination takes roughly 3 hours, including breaks in which refreshments are provided. Guests should bring an examination fee of $50 (check payable to CLS or exact cash). Additional details are provided in the registration confirmation email each guest receives.

Overview and Scoring

Latin School administers the Scholastic Testing Service (STS) Educational Development Series for 5th, 6th and 7th grade students. Score performances are calculated as national percentiles in which individual student scores are compared to national score performances. Please note that percentiles are not the same as percentages - if a student tests into the 66th percentile, it doesn't mean they answered 66% of the questions correctly, but rather, that they tested in the top 1/3 of students taking this exam nationally.

The Battery Average score (a composite of all three subject percentile scores) is the strongest single indicator of a student's suitability for the Latin School curriculum. Once the Admissions Committee has received and analyzed the exam results, prospective students are notified of their score and admissions decision.

The examination assesses three foundational areas - mathematics, reading and language arts - and each are further divided into two categories:

Math

Computation measures a student's ability to compute problems of varying degrees of difficulty without the use of a calculator.

Reading

Vocabulary measures a student's knowledge of words, largely through synonyms and antonyms within sentence structures and pairs of words that best relate in a sentence.

Comprehension measures a student's understanding of short passages; some questions are purely factual, some require a judgment.

Language Arts

Writing List(grammar rules) measures a student's grasp of the mechanics of grammar by asking them to identify words that are misspelled or incorrectly capitalized, and phrases or clauses that are incorrectly punctuated.

Admissability

The minimum Battery Average percentile to earn admission varies based upon the size and academic strength of the applicant pool each year. If parents feel that an initial score does not accurately reflect their child's ability, students are encouraged to retake the examination a second time - the Admissions Office is available for parental consult on retake strategies.

Please contact Amy Darpel in Admissions, with any additional questions on testing or results.